INTERNATIONAL
October 2, 2000
at the Energy
in the New Century
conference hosted byThe Energy
Institute of the Americas

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

In the short time allocated to
our opening remarks, I will not even attempt to quantify any added views
on the supply and demand for either North American natural gas or
worldwide oil. The task is actually impossible to do with any degree of
precision as medium-term demand for energy sources might be severely
limited by no extra supply. Reliable short-term, medium and long-term
supply numbers also cannot be calculated with any degree of precision
without having access to data on the relentless decline rates that are
occurring in almost every significant oil and gas field in the world.
Sadly, this data does not even exist in any published form.

What I want to address today
are the physical limits we face to increasing supply of either North
American gas or worldwide oil. Limits at the wellhead, limits at the
rig, limits to transportation, limits to virtually every moving piece of
the system. At the end of the day, these physical limits, and the time,
people and capital required to eliminate them, will determine the length
and severity of the Energy Crisis that is now descending over the world.

For a decade, I have worried
and warned about the prospects of facing another Oil Shock. I
experienced the effects of the two oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. Both
were ugly events. They also triggered the only major recessions I have
ever personally known. I tried to warn various industry and public
service groups that energy troubles were ahead unless a lot of changes
were made, like drilling a lot more wells and expanding our pipelines
and refineries. But nobody chose to hear my message, or heard it and
said, “What a bullish view. If he is right, oil prices will rise.”
And they ultimately did.

So a decade of warnings went
unheeded and today we find ourselves in the early stages of a savage
Energy Crisis. But it turns out to be far different crisis than what I
originally worried about. I feared we would face an Oil Shock. I was
wrong. We are now facing a true Energy Crisis as too many key parts of
the world have run out of the ability to increase electricity demand,
natural gas demand and petroleum demand. All three prime sources of
energy converged into a limit against further growth almost
simultaneously.

The situation is real. And it
is very grave. If any of you read “The Perfect Storm” where a
100-year world-class storm materializes out of nowhere through the
convergence of three freak weather systems, our Energy Crisis results
from the same phenomenon. All three energy fronts are now colliding with
each other.

Let me also be perfectly
clear. The world has not run out of oil and North America has not run
out of natural gas. Moreover, there are still lots of potential
kilowatts to create. What we have run short of is any way to grow the
supply of each of these energy sources. In the meantime, significant
bottlenecks exist which will possibly make it hard to even keep the
supply of all three energy sources flat.

There is a definite risk that
each source could actually decline before any solutions to finally get
supply growing again can be implemented. Let me begin putting some
details into this bleak picture with a few commentaries on world wide
oil supplies. There are only a handful of meaningful new supply projects
now underway throughout any of the 40 key countries that keep the world
oil supplies in tact. Do not look for a lot of growth in worldwide oil
supply from new projects coming on stream. There are not enough projects
for this to happen through at least 2005. The big supply question on the
oil front is how much capacity is left behind OPEC”s wellhead valves,
just waiting for a valve to open before coming on stream.

There is lots of speculation
about OPEC’s excess capacity. But all guesses are simply guesses. No
one really knows the answer and no one will know until it is clear that
all the taps are finally on. The guesses still range from as high as 3
million barrels a day to as little as 500,000 barrels a day. But even
these numbers often start with a difference of opinion on what the OPEC
countries are now producing.

I might as well throw my guess
into this vacuum. It would be impossible for the world to still have 3
million barrels a day capacity left. The people tossing out these
numbers lack the knowledge of what too many key fields are now doing to
make these guesses even credible. I worry that the real number is very
near the bottom of this range and maybe even below 500,000 barrels per
day. But, my guess is simply a guess.

North American natural gas has
no excess capacity. It disappeared several years ago. What we do have is
extremely aggressive decline rates in almost every key production basin
making it harder each season to keep current production flat.

The electricity business has
also run out of almost all existing generating capacity, whether this
capacity is a coal-fired plant, a nuclear plant or a dam. The
electricity business has already responded to this shortage. Orders for
a massive number of natural gas-fired plants have already been placed.
But these new gas plants require an unbelievable amount of natural gas.
This immediate need for so much incremental supply is simply not there.

For all intents and purposes,
we are now out of any meaningful energy cushions, not just in the U.S.
but virtually throughout the world. This picture is grim enough. But it
is merely the tip of the “limitation iceberg.” We have about 120
spare rigs of any type in the entire world which are currently idle.
But, shift to any continent and you end up seeing 20 spare land rigs in
Africa or 9 in Europe.

These are not big rig numbers
for significant drilling arenas. 120 spare rigs are not many in the
first place, but when you look at the quality of many of these rigs, you
see many are at the bottom of the food chain and are in terrible shape.
It is also questionable whether some of these rigs can even work or can
get trained crews to run them.

When the world is finally out
of rigs, as happened in late 1997 through the middle of 1998, until the
oil price collapse drove drilling activity down again, we then face a
long march to attempt to grow the rig count. For the next five years,
the battle will be rig growth versus rig attrition. So, there is a
chance that rig activity will stay flat for some time even though 25 to
30 rigs are added each year. This sounds like a small number but it
represents my best guess at the manufacturing capacity to build new
drilling rigs on a worldwide basis.

Drilling rig manufacturing
capacity can be expanded. But I fear it will take a year or two of utter
confusion to finally give the handful of rig manufacturers the courage
to begin building new plants. After all, they were enforcing layoffs
once more only 18 months ago.

If the lack of rigs were the
energy industry’s only problem, it would be bad enough. But
superimpose on this shortage a lack of spare refinery capacity in the
United States and probably Europe. Then add to these woes a worldwide
lack of any spare tanker capacity. The tanker shortage also makes any
spare wellhead capacity in the Middle East irrelevant for any consumers
who have to transport the oil over the waters.

We are also out of most
pipeline capacity in too many key markets and we lack a reliable
electricity transmission system in the U.S. even if we still had spare
generating capacity.

Each of these limits are
“hard iron and steel” related. When you are out, you are out until
something new gets built. But, these limits might be the easy part of
the picture. Recruiting new energy industry people is a problem of even
graver magnitude.

We are barreling into an era,
at least in the U.S., where we have to cap any further growth in demand
for all forms of energy. It simply cannot happen. Hopefully we can find
a way to keep the current energy use flat, but even this modest goal
will not be easy.

What makes this energy outlook
so sad is that it did not need to happen. Had the energy business or the
government better understood how to properly analyze the right data, and
appreciated some of the flaws in this data, so many of the terrible
energy mistakes we made throughout the 1990’s might not have occurred.But the mistakes were real and the Energy Crisis is also real. My
worst fear today is that we accidentally make it worse. There is an old
adage “When you suddenly find yourself in a hole, rule number one is
to stop digging!”

Because so few key
decision-makers understand we even have a critical problem on our hands,
there is a great risk we postpone any real corrective steps while also
imposing further damage.

I wish I had better news to
deliver today. This will be a tough surprise for our financial markets
that seem convinced that today’s seemingly high energy prices will
soon go away. I fear the prices might go away, but not in a downward
direction.

It is time for everyone to
take off their rose-colored glasses or to casually dismiss views like
mine as being overly bullish or overly bearish. We are about to get a
real energy wake-up call. Sadly, the alarm went off too late. There is
no reason to believe that these limits cannot ultimately be solved, but
getting this done will consume most of the next decade.

Thank you for letting me address these extremely serious issues on this
important forum.